Students in the Spotlight

  • Three Master of Social Work Alums Receive National Award

    Posted September 23, 2011

    Three Master of Social Work students who graduated in May of 2011, Lee Malvin, Kristianna Hall, and Robert Jones received a national award from the Influencing State Policy (ISP) committee of the Council on Social Work Education.  Each year ISP gives an award to one graduate student group and one undergraduate student group for their work on policy change at the state level.

    Malvin, Hall, and Jones were recognized for their efforts to defeat a bill in the Legislature last spring which would have denied Medicaid (MaineCare) benefits to people who smoked.  Lee, Krista and Bobby documented how this was discriminatory and Lee gave testimony in Augusta.  The prize was $500 and only one is given nationally.

    The three are pictured at right preparing to march at the May 2011 Commencement.

  • Jonathan Paul, Recent Doctoral Alum in Neuroscience Receives Dissertation Award from ISDP

    Dr. Jonathan Paul, who recently completed a neuroscience Ph.D. in the UMaine Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, has received the outstanding dissertation award from the International Society for Developmental Psychology (ISDP).  Paul, who finished his UMaine degree in August, is in an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Texas Medical Branch Maternal-Fetal Center.  Paul will give a presentation on his work at an upcoming meeting of the ISDP.  Dr. Marie Hayes, Professor of Psychology served as Paul's faculty mentor, and is pictured at left with Paul.

  • Doctoral Student in Chemistry, James Killarney Presenting at Capitol Hill Reception

    Posted September 16, 2011

    Chemistry Ph.D. candidate James Killarney, who works with Dr. Howard Patterson in the Patterson Research group, will present his work to members of Congress and Environmental Protection Agency administrators at a Capitol Hill Reception for graduate fellows being funded by the EPA next week.   Working in the second year of a EPA STAR Fellowship, Killarney focuses on chemometric modeling of pharmaceutical contamination in water.

  • Aaron Putnam, Earth Sciences Ph.D. Student's Research Included in Greenland Project

    Posted September 13, 2011

    Ph.D. in Earth Sciences candidate, Aaron Putnam is a member of an international team of scientists who have produced a prediction of what climate records from Greenland might look like over the last 800,000 years and investigation into the possible causes of abrupt climate change.

    Putnam, a glacial geologist in UMaine’s Department of Earth Sciences and Climate Change Institute, contributed research to a paper posted Sept. 8 on the website of the journal Science. The paper will be published in an upcoming issue of Science, the leading scientific journal in the United States.

    Stephen Barker of Cardiff University in Wales, U.K., led the research team.

    An announcement from Cardiff University about the publication said the research demonstrates that abrupt climate change has been a systemic feature of Earth’s climate for hundreds of thousands of years and may play an active role in longer-term climate variability through its influence on ice age terminations.

    The Greenland conditions – temperature records of which go back only approximately 100,000 years – were reconstructed by utilizing ice core temperature records retrieved from Antarctica. The researchers used a mathematical formulation to extend the Greenland record. The new predictions provide an extended testing bed for climate models that are used to predict future climate variability.

    The research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Natural Environment Research Council in the U.K., and the National Science Foundation in the U.S.

    Putnam is a Chapman native who has a master’s degree from UMaine, will be graduating from the doctoral program in December of 2011.

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